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How The Cult Of Anti-Racism Usurps Every Human's Need For Religious Purpose
[The Federalist] In the absence of any religious sense of meaning in life, substitutes rush in to fill the void.It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at Villanova professor Vincent Lloyd’s tale of being canceled by his summer seminar students. There would have been an element of tragedy if he had suffered real loss, but as he endured nothing worse than a few unpleasant weeks of teaching, the story is a comedic masterpiece. The seminar was an intense and selective program for high school students; the curriculum was largely devoted to studying anti-black racism. The course ended with a majority of Lloyd’s students declaring, among other accusations, that "the seminar perpetuated anti-black violence" and that Lloyd, who is a black academic with a CV filled with anti-racist bona fides, "was guilty of countless microaggressions." A left-wing black professor teaching an anti-racism seminar being denounced by his own radicalized students is an invitation to schadenfreude, especially because, as he put it, "Like others on the left, I had been dismissive of criticisms of the current discourse on race in the United States." Mugged by reality indeed — though by the standards of social justice mobs, he got off easy, with his job and reputation still intact. Now he describes the sort of anti-racism that took over his class as a "cult" and argues that "Pushing anti-racism to its limits, what we reach isn’t just hollow doctrine, but abuse." Lloyd blames the radicalization of his students primarily on one of his teaching assistants, a young black woman who is a "recent graduate of an Ivy League university, mentored by a television-celebrity black intellectual." His analysis of how her influence, combined with the program’s intensity, in which the students were constantly together and largely isolated from the rest of the world, encouraged radicalization, is convincing — but only to a point. It’s not just the force of personality, or peer pressure, that resulted in his students expelling peers as racists and turning on the professor. But Lloyd does not address the deeper appeal of the radicalism he encountered. Why is this cult, as he calls it, winning converts, especially among the privileged? After all, wokeness is the language of the elites, not the streets. An answer to this question may be unexpectedly discerned in a recent piece by Caitlin Moscatello, which discusses the travails of wealthy New York women who have found that climbing to the top is exhausting, and trying to stay there is expensive and exhausting. Moscatello reports that the FX show "Fleishman is in Trouble" has resonated with "the women in Manhattan and Brooklyn anxiously holding on to whatever rung of the success ladder they’ve managed to grasp," as well as those who feel like they lost their identity by leaving the city for the suburbs. Posted by: Besoeker 2023-02-19 |
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